Google wants to speed up the mobile web

The delicious irony here. The horribly bloated and slow-loading Verge.com published a story about Google speeding up the mobile web.

Last summer, a Verge.com writing dolt blamed the slowness of the mobile web on browsers and not the disgustingly-designed websites that are bogged down with giant images, trackers, huge CSS files, and a ton of JavaScript.

Google has a new plan to speed up the mobile web

Today, the company announced a technical preview for a system called Accelerated Mobile Pages (or AMP), designed to fight many of the factors slowing and bloating mobile web pages.

Google is trying to fix the problems created by website designers, developers, and probably the ever-present "stakeholders."

If the system works, users should see lighter, faster-loading mobile web pages as a result.

Website owners can do this on their own by limiting or eliminating JavaScript exposure to the browsing-only users and reducing the amount of giant images that get downloaded. With some effort and common sense, you don't need help from Google to make websites load quickly on the mobile web.

http://babyutoledo.com :

no javascript for the browsing-only user
smallish images and few images per page
pages are cached with memcached

I created babyutoledo.com for a local non-profit group to be simple and lightweight. The focus is on the content and the org's purpose. I wanted the reading experience to be comfortable for the users on any device.

I'm sure that I can do more to streamline the pages and CSS to speed up page download speed.

My niche blog sites also use memcached. A few examples:

Keep it simple and lightweight, and the pages load well on mobile.

I created this static page with no JavaScript as an example of what I would like to see produced by the Toledo Blade. I would pay a hefty digital subscription if I could get pages like this.

http://testcode.soupmode.com/article/post8.html

I also posted it here:
http://toledotalk.com/last-alarm.html

as part of a comment that I posted to Toledo Talk in September 2015 in a thread about the Blade's new mobile format.

Excerpts from my comment:

I don't need a printed paper version. I don't need an app. I prefer one website that responds comfortably on all devices and loads fast with no mountains of JavaScript bilge, no huge irrelevant images, no ads, and no trackers and other gobbledygook that bog down page load speed.
It would be nice if the article page contained a large-ish font size and a lot of negative space. I don't understand why some responsively-designed websites use a tiny, uncomfortable font size on mobile.

I see no need for a bunch of navigation links in the header and footer areas of an article page. No fixed areas. No hamburger or similar menu icons, like I use here. The only link needed is a link to the home page. The reader can find all the site's link cruft on the home page.

Give non-paying customers the hideous views, and give subscribers something worth buying. Until this utopia exists, I'll continue reading with JavaScript disabled, which improves the web-viewing experience a lot.

In that comment, I referenced one of my favorite views on the subject of a bloated web http://motherfuckingwebsite.com :

What I'm saying is that all the problems we have with websites are ones we create ourselves.
Websites aren't broken by default, they are functional, high-performing, and accessible. You break them. You son-of-a-bitch.

Google's project may be proof that websites have been overly engineered to a massive fault for too many years. And it may be proof that website owners have been more concerned with displaying new tech skills, instead of exhibiting empathy for the readers.

Site owners should create a humane web experience.

Google project:
https://www.ampproject.org

HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10345777

http://buzzmachine.com/2015/10/07/faster-distributed-web

To view a demo, access this link on a mobile browser and search for a term, such as "Obama."

http://g.co/ampdemo

http://mediagazer.com/151007/p11#a151007p11

http://marketingland.com/google-open-mobile-web-145588

It's interesting that website owners may be thrilled to receive a solution to a problem that they created.

If you are smashing your left hand with a hammer that you are holding in your right hand, you should not be thrilled to receive some padding to protect your left hand while you continue to hammer away at it. Obviously, the smart thing to do would be to drop the hammer. And don't blame the hammer manufacturer for your ailing left hand.

Don't misuse technology to create a problem. Don't whine about the technology. And don't hope that someone creates new technology to solve the problem that you created.

Back to Google's project:

https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2015/10/introducing-accelerated-mobile-pages.html

https://vip.wordpress.com/2015/10/07/mobile-web/

Does this mean that website owners, designers, and developers can continue to create poor UX experiences because they can rely on other services to do the work that they refuse to do?

The homepage and individual thread pages for this site load fast.
https://news.ycombinator.com

https://www.ampproject.org/how-it-works/

https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/master/docs/create_page.md

Brilliant analysis.

https://mobile.twitter.com/om/status/651759921990647808

Publishers embracing Facebook, Google & Apple platforms are merely shining light on their own technical incompetence

http://www.niemanlab.org/2015/10/get-ampd-heres-what-publishers-need-to-know-about-googles-new-plan-to-speed-up-your-website/

Example page
http://www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2015/10/7/9467149/google-accelerated-mobile-pages-caching-preview

Etc.

http://www.nateberkopec.com/2015/10/07/frontend-performance-chrome-timeline.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10345589

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10358597

From JR's : articles
839 words - 6165 chars - 4 min read
created on Oct 07, 2015 at 11:54:22 am
updated on Oct 09, 2015 at 05:51:42 am - #
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